Red Cliff: Discussion by Rob

Having been married to Chelle for a number of years, I've seen my share of Asian battle epics.  Having been a film student, I've also seen my share of John Woo movies.  Red Cliff is both an exemplary battle epic and a fine John Woo film. However, it is at its best when you forget it's a John Woo movie.  In fact, the only thing I didn't like about Red Cliff is that every now and again, John Woo's head would pop up out of the lower right-hand corner of the screen, (you know, all MK2 "Toasty"-style) and announce, "Remember kids, you've watching a John Woo film."  Okay, not literally, but he threw in all these intrusive bits of camera work that achieved basically the same thing.  As a film-goer, I find that if I even notice the camera work, it's because the director made a poor choice, or the film is extremely boring.  And Red Cliff is certainly not boring.

Now that the negative out of the way, let me tell you what I liked.

A) The cast - I've got to hand it to Chelle, even though much of it is based on personal crushes, she does have good taste in Asian actors.
B) The battles - I'm not a huge fan of action films, and even here the extended battle scenes started to lose me near the end, but that's not a flaw in the movie, just in my attention span for that sort of thing.  What I liked about the battles scenes is that you could see the overall military strategy at work, not just the individual combatants slicing each other into itty bitty bits (although they did that too).  I know, being able to see the overall military strategy probably doesn't make you want to rush out and rent the movie. In fact it sounds much nerdier than I'd intended, but nonetheless it added a dimension to the battle scenes that you rarely see, and it was necessary to the overall story.
C) The story - The whole theme of the movie is that battles are won with the mind rather than with physical strength. Throughout the film, every decision that Jedi master Takeshi Kaneshiro makes is more clever and effective than the last one.  Chelle tells me that this story is a time-honored and well-known legend in China, and it's easy to see how the individual scenes would make great oral or prose stories.

The verdict: Chelle done good.